Minecraft: Pi Edition now available, gives you something to play on your Raspberry Pi

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You may already have Minecraft on your computer, your Xbox 360, and your smartphone, but now you can get a version that was specifically ported to run well on the Raspberry Pi. If you’re one of those people that really want a Raspberry Pi but have no idea what to do with one once you get it, making it a dedicated $35 Minecraft machine is now a viable option.

The biggest benefit of having the secretly resource-intensive Minecraft run on the relatively resource-light Raspberry Pi is that in the port, Mojang added support for a handful of programming languages. So, rather than simply building impressive creations in the blocky world, people can use the combination of a very cheap computer and a game they enjoy to teach themselves how to program.

How to setup Minecraft on your Raspberry Pi

It takes a slight bit of preparation to run Minecraft on the Pi, which starts out with using the “wheezy” version of Raspbian (download here).

The game requires XWindows running, so Mojang suggests that you have XWindows set to start automatically upon boot by typing in “startx” without the quotation marks.

Download the compressed file over here, then launch the terminal by clicking on the LXTerminal window, then enter the following commands into the terminal: